There is a concrete lid in the yard of every house on a well and a septic system, and most owners walk past it for twenty years. Nothing good is under there.
Let’s talk about selling a house where the city line stops. Water comes out of your own ground, waste goes into your own yard, and both become paperwork when a buyer shows up. It comes up most on the unincorporated edges of Sacramento County, in Wilton and Herald and Walnut Grove, out past Galt and Elk Grove.
THE HOUSE HAS TWO UTILITIES AND NEITHER ONE HAS A PHONE NUMBER
A city house has a water department and a sewer district. A house on a well and a tank has the same two services and no dispatch desk. You are the dispatch desk.
The county is not running your water and it is not emptying your tank. It is the regulator. Sacramento County does that through its Environmental Management Department. The Well Program covers construction, modification, repair, inactivation and destruction of wells under Chapter 6.28 of the Sacramento County Code and Section 13801 of the California Water Code, and every well here needs a permit before drilling unless the code exempts it. The Liquid Waste Program covers the design and installation of on-site wastewater treatment systems and holding tanks.
A SEPTIC SYSTEM IS A SMALL TREATMENT PLANT THAT HAPPENS TO BE IN YOUR YARD
Here is the comparison I use. A septic system is a small sewage treatment plant. Not a tank, not a magic hole. A plant, with an inlet, a settling stage, a digestion stage and a discharge stage, sized for one house instead of one town.
Now let me audit it. A real plant has an operator, a log book and a discharge permit with monitoring attached. Yours has an owner who is also the operator, and the monitoring is a lid you are supposed to remember. The county regulates the installation and the repairs, not the operation. The guidance says to pump the tank at least every three to five years.
THE COUNTY MAP HAS TWO KINDS OF GROUND, AND YOUR PARCEL IS ON ONE OF THEM
For septic, the county divides into standard areas and test drill areas, and that decides whether the soil gets tested. In the standard area the rule is one dry well, also called a seepage pit, per bedroom, 35 to 40 feet deep, plus a minimum 1,200 gallon tank. In a test drill area, testing is required, with county staff present and a rig capable of a 40 to 50 foot hole at least a foot and a half across.
The county puts the success rate of those drills at approximately 90 percent, and sends a failed one to a private firm: a registered civil engineer, a registered geologist or a registered environmental health specialist. It names two places where you call staff first, the Sacramento River Delta and the Garden Highway area. It routes the sewer question to the Sacramento Area Sewer District, noting that if sewer is available within 200 feet of your property line, you may be required to connect.
WHERE THE RECORD IS, AND WHY A MISSING ONE IS NOT A BAD SYSTEM
The county keeps databases of permitted wells and permitted septic systems, and approves plot plans when a building permit is issued. That is where the map of your own yard lives. If you want the record, the septic FAQ points you at a Public Records Act request, and the department sits at 11080 White Rock Rd in Rancho Cordova.
Wells have their own paper. A Well Completion Report, DWR Form 188, is filed with the county and with the California Department of Water Resources within 60 days of construction, repair, modification or destruction.
Here is where I have to be careful. A missing record does not prove the system is bad. Plenty went in before anybody kept a good file, and plenty of files have gone missing since 1850. What it means is that nobody can confirm the thing from a desk. Somebody has to go look. There is a program for the well you are not using: the Abandoned Wells Program, and a permit to inactivate or destroy a well.
A REPAIR PERMIT IS NOT A REPLACEMENT PERMIT, AND THE DIFFERENCE HAS TEETH
Adding leaching capacity to a system that has a permit on file comes with a requirement that catches people: current code calls for replacement of 100% of the original leaching system, not just the failed part. In a test drill area, any repair on a system under 8 years old requires a test drill.
Who can do the work is narrower than people expect. Only a licensed contractor may apply for and install a septic system, and the license has to be C-36 Plumbing, C-42 Sanitation or General A Engineering, unless an owner-builder is doing the work personally. A well permit goes to the legal owner, a C-57 licensed well drilling contractor, or an authorized representative.
WHAT I ACTUALLY ASK BEFORE I MAKE AN OFFER
When I walk a property out past the city line, I am not there to grade the kitchen. I ask four things. Is the water from a well or a district? Is the waste going into a tank or a pipe? Is there a permit record for either, and can it be found? And has anything been added, moved or abandoned since that record was written?
Then I make two calls. One to the county, to see what the file says. One to a contractor who does this work for a living, because a file describes what was permitted and a person standing over the tank describes what is actually there. When those two disagree, that is the reason to make both calls.
I will say the obvious part plainly. A house on a private system asks more of a buyer than a house on a city pipe, and answering those questions takes time and money. That is why the as-is conversation belongs early rather than in the last week of escrow, and why what as-is actually covers matters here. The process page lists every point where you can still walk away.
I am not going to tell you what your system needs. The county is the only one who can say what your parcel is allowed to have. What I can tell you is where the records are.
We buy houses as they sit, on wells and on tanks, in eleven cities including Galt and Elk Grove. If your house is out past the edge of one of them, that is a conversation, not a no.
Question for you: do you know where the lid is, and whether the county has a record of what is under it? Most owners can answer the first one.
